Cheng Bugao was born in 1896 in Pinghu, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, and first attended the private Yigu Primary School before entering Aurora University in Shanghai, where his interest in film took root and he wrote film reviews for the Qingguang supplement of the Shishi Xinbao under a pen name and helped edit journals such as Film Magazine and Film and Drama Chronicle; he returned home without graduating to teach at Dengying Primary School. He went to Shanghai in 1922 and from 1924 entered filmmaking, shooting the documentaries Wu Peifu and Scenery of Luoyang for the Dalu company, writing the screenplay Village Girl, and then founding the Great Wall Film Company with Sun Yu and Yang Xiaozhong, directing films such as Shachang Lei and Kong Men Xian Xi. From 1928 he was a director-writer at Mingxing Film Company, making films such as Divorce, The Life of the Rich and The Golden Road. In 1933, his peak year, he directed Wild Torrent, written by Xia Yan under the pen name Ding Yizhi, and Spring Silkworms, adapted from Mao Dun's novella and also scripted by Xia Yan; both are regarded as landmarks of left-wing and realist Chinese cinema. Wild Torrent sets a flood and corruption against each other and ends with the villains engulfed by the floodwaters, while Spring Silkworms was shot on location in a Zhejiang village with Gong Jianong, Gao Qianping, Ai Xia and Zheng Xiaoqiu, portraying silkworm farmers in near-documentary style. In 1936 he made New and Old Shanghai. During the war he worked in the Third Office of the Political Department on anti-Japanese propaganda and for the China Film Studio. He moved to Hong Kong in 1947, working for the Yonghua and Great Wall studios and making largely apolitical commercial films such as Sorrows of the Forbidden City-era melodrama Bloodshed in the City (1947) and The Beauty Trap (1961). He wrote or directed more than sixty features in his career and left a 150,000-word memoir of the early Shanghai film world, published in 1983, and died in Hong Kong on 20 June 1966 at the age of seventy.
Cheng Bugao was a principal director at Mingxing Film Company in the 1930s; his Wild Torrent and Spring Silkworms brought social realism and class themes into Chinese cinema and became key works of the left-wing film movement. After the war he made commercial films in Hong Kong, directing more than sixty features in all, and in later life recorded the early film world in his memoir.
Achievements
- 1924 · Entered filmmaking, directing films such as Shachang Lei for several studios
- 1933 · Directed Wild Torrent and Spring Silkworms, landmarks of left-wing realist cinema
- 1947 · Moved to Hong Kong and continued directing for the Yonghua and Great Wall studios